Isaiah Washington, free speech martyr? I feel a headache coming on…

Generally I don’t like to make the Blog of Lowered Expectations a heavy place. I imagine it as forum for light banter about television at its finest and dopiest – a funhouse, as it were, hidden in the electronic forest you know as seattlepi.com.

But sometimes a news bomb’s fallout really, really makes my head hurt, and the only way to make the pain go away is to bust out with a rant like this:

People. Seriously. Enough with linking Isaiah Washington’s firing to the erosion of First Amendment Rights. Your hearts are in the right place. The e-mails and blog responses like the ones posted here certainly are appreciated. But handsome as Mr. Washington is, he is not the poster child for freedom of speech by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m not saying this because he said something offensive. Heck, I offend people all the time. I find slurs to be unconscionable in any context, but beyond that, political correctness irks the crap out of me.

One blog responder echoed my sentiments about the tyranny of P.C. obsessives to the letter when he wrote, “Freedom of speech, as Aaron Sorkin so eloquently pointed out in ‘The American President,’ isn’t easy. It’s standing and listening to your opponent advocate, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing. Speech is only truly free when we’re free to speak.”

Absolutely true. Now if only Isaiah Washington were standing on a street corner, frolicking in Times Square, or lipping off at a bar.

He wasn’t. What both of his offending incidents have in common, besides his usage of the other F-bomb, was that Washington was representing ABC. That would be the American Broadcasting Company. He was at work.

People seem to forget all that when they’re watching a TV show like “Grey’s Anatomy.” You are watching a product funded by a large corporate entity that makes decisions based on its own interests. You are seeing people working on sets built and paid for by ABC Television Studios, collecting checks signed and cut by the network.

When you’re at work, you follow the rules set by your employer, don’t you? Of course. That’s common sense. And most company guidelines include language about respecting your fellow employees and refraining from talking about any person’s race, class, sexual orientation, religion, what have you, in demeaning terms.

Let’s say you work at a fairly typical, well-regarded company. If one of your co-workers known for his off-color racial jokes, a guy who already got a warning from the H.R. department, decided to recite a monologue from “The Turner Diaries” in front of a full lunch room, you can bet your butt cakes that guy would be shown the door. This is America, and he has a right to express himself anywhere. But if he’s doing so at work and on the company dime, his boss has a right to fire him.

And if you have an employee who stirs up trouble in front of the camera and is difficult behind the scenes – something whispered about Washington long before Shonda Rhimes had her first wet dream about “Grey’s” – you’re going to cut bait as soon as he gives you a reason.

ABC took eight months to swing the ax, six if you count from the Globes debacle. A lot of people are bothered about the delay; that’s understandable. If ABC wanted to send a message, it should have booted the guy right after the press release from on high went out and instructed Rhimes to give Preston Burke a massive heart attack. The stories of problematic actors abruptly written out of shows could fill a very large book.

But it’s been years since ABC had a contender on Thursdays, prime time’s most lucrative night of the week. Why take chances with a successful formula? Because dismissing Washington immediately would have been the right thing to do? Yeah, right. This is the network that once brought us “Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People.” Appeasing our sense of right and wrong is not really at the top of its list.

Getting us to keep watching is, though. Hence, Burke and Cristina Yang’s very central storyline played out through their wedding interruptus, leaving viewers shocked, shocked, or something like that. Washington, meanwhile, did his best to keep his job by apologizing, getting counseling, and doing all the right things.

To most of the public, that should have been enough. “Consequences for the thoughtless slur? Absolutely, and real enough to sting,” the above-quoted blog poster continued. “But let’s be honest with ourselves: Do we want contrition and a sincere apology and a person with a new appreciation of the power of words? Or do we just want disgrace and humiliation and an opportunity to wallow in our self-righteousness? Can’t have both. Choose. Or lose the freedom to even make the choice.”

Sure we want contrition. But this reaction presumes that viewers have a say in the matter. Do you think ABC executives care whether we accepted Washington’s mea culpas? Sorry to burst your bubble, but this is the entertainment industry. We only matter as far as our tuning in keeps the ratings up, thereby keeping advertisers happy. Have you learned nothing from The Donald? It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

By the way, why do I have a hunch that most of the people crying foul about Washington’s firing or CBS’s axing Don Imus didn’t utter a peep when protesters were being corralled into “free speech zones” in New York and Boston during the 2004 political conventions?

To me, that is more representative of a clear and present danger to our First Amendment Rights.

Demonstrators get thwacked in the head for voicing their dissent to government policy, and we shrug. An ego-tripping actor and a widely adored radio personality are fired by their employers for using language that degrades entire classes of people while on the job, and suddenly everyone’s a card-carrying member of the ACLU?

Now that’s disheartening.

You want to link Washington to a cause? Slap his head shot on literature about respect and dignity in the workplace. Splice the press conference footage from the Golden Globes into an industrial film about what constitutes a hostile working environment.

But please, please, please, don’t drag the struggle against censorship into this. It’s true, our First Amendment freedoms, the rights our parents, grandparents and this country’s founders fought and died for, are under assault.

We have well-funded interest groups on Capitol Hill trying to push their puritanical agenda to censor prime-time content. We have a Federal Communications Commission hungry to play nanny over what we see on our televisions. We are told “free speech zones” are walled-in places hidden away from news cameras, infringing on our rights to peacefully assemble and reducing the presence of dissenting voices in our news coverage.

Get riled up about those things instead of busting a vein over famous people whose big mouths get them pink-slipped. Then, we’ll finally take the much-needed step towards standing up for free speech.

One last thing: Another blog poster used the fact he couldn’t write the word a**hole in the comments section as an example of censorship. He’s right. This blog and this Web site do censor language they deem offensive. Even I’ve had problems getting certain words in here.

This may be my funhouse, but it’s on P-I property and subject to its rules. Remember that.

We do not, however, censor ideas. As long as you are a respecful guest, you are welcome here. Everybody should be comfortable to discuss, debate, celebrate and complain about television. Be snarky. Be sarcastic. Have fun. Disagree with me and your fellow viewers. Play nice. No ad hominem attacks, no name-calling and no slurs.